#2 Be What You Are

When I stated to a friend that Douglas Rushkoff’s book Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say was the most influential treatise on black magic published in the last ten years, I was only half joking. Our individual worldviews are dangling on the puppet strings of the media’s news releases; created in the wake of a thousand persuaders, each striving desperately to sell us their view of reality. I’m doing the same thing, promoting a worldview less centralized, more empowering to the individual, but without overlooking the importance and influence of superorganisms and group collectives. Because I have less influence than the media conglomerates, my worldview which I am trying to pass on to you is not as dominate as the collective cultural worldview produced on Madison Avenue.

I do not want to start this off with the statement that all marketing is bad, or that all corporations are out to eat you. Good marketing tells you what you didn’t know about a product that you may very well be interested in, and the product itself should deliver on the promises implicit in the advertisment. If it doesn’t, don’t buy any more shit from that company. We can dig back through history and make the assumption that this is precisely why the Sears catalogue was the powerhouse merchandiser of the turn of the century. But that is far from the standard operations of government and religious advertising, and even product awareness and marketing have shifted dramatically from honest product information once a standard in advertisments. I for one would welcome a return to such standards.

Instead, today we are enmeshed in a matrix of media messages the bulk of which rely upon persuasion techniques refined by years of market pressure and behavioral psychology.

“To influence us, they disable our capacity to make reasoned judgements and appeal to deeper, perhaps unresolved, and certainly unrelated issues. By understanding the unconscious processes we use to make our choices of what to buy, where to eat, whom to respect, and how to feel, clever influence professionals can sidestep our critical faculties and compel us to act however they please. We are disconnected from our own further disempowerment. The less we are satisfied by our decisions, the more easily manipulated we become. “To restore our own ability to act wilfully, we must accept that we are the ones actively submitting to the influence of others. We are influenced because, on some level, we want to be.”
(Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say – 1999, Douglas Rushkoff, p. 19)

This influence is by no means restricted to advertising. In fact, advertising in the traditional sense comprises a much less serious threat to our unconscious than the whole of mass communications. What is presented isn’t an advertisment for a product, but an entire worldview composed of what can be considered self-censoring corporate culture. And we are complicit in the spread of the mediocre psychic environment we now find ourselves.

Our responsibility is to embrace that which does a better job of explaining reality and discard that which obfuscates. We need to become conscious of our true selves to do this, which means discarding the personas long enough to comprehend how our persona influences our perceptions.

“… by unconsciously accepting mass communications, we are adopting alien thought patterns. These thought patterns have an agenda, thought patterns that triggered a buzz-whir effect in our brains so that presented with certain situations, we have a knee-jerk reaction that although it feels like a free formed ‘logical’ action, was actually implanted in our brains.”
(Twisp, Ben Mack, p. 39)

How does this work? In part because of how the brain operates:

“Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him… Anyone can be made to hear voices with scrambling techniques… To carry it further you can use recordings of voices known to him.”
(The Electronic Revolution, 1967, William S. Burroughs)

Taking this a step further, when a person normally hears or believes he hears voices from within:

“… it is regarded either as undiluted nonsense or as the voice of God. It does not seem to occur to any one that there might be something valuable in between.” (Four Archetypes, Carl G. Jung)

This is one of the tricks in the bag of a audio sculpture/remix artist. Devising incredibly small bits of information that come from an overall pattern, then re-arranging the bits of information in an engaging way provides a structure from which the brain re-assembles the message. Three things become one. Repetition drives memorization. Especially when we are running on robot, when we aren’t fully home, which appears to be the normal level of operation for most of us.

“… people are seldom at home, always somewhere else, always ‘absent.’ Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. And the simple reason for it is: FEAR.
“As we see whenever a war breaks out, the fear of war is overcome the moment one is really in it. If war were really as terrible as people imagine it to be it would have been wiped out long ago. To make war is as natural for human beings as to make love. Love can make cowards of men just as much as the fear of war. But once desperately in love a man will commit any crime and not only feel justified, but feel good about it. It is the order of things.
“The wisest men are those who speak of illusion: MAYA. Illusion is the antidote to fear. In harness they render life absurdly illogical.”
(The Wisdom of the Heart – 1941, Henry V. Miller, p. 96)

Developing an Internal Body Language

by Taylor Ellwood

In Inner Alchemy, I wrote about my experiments with finding and working with neurotransmitter spirit guides and forms of life (such as bacteria) that exist in the human body. I created an alphabet of desire with each letter representing a distinct entity. The letter could be used to find the entity when doing internal work with the body or it could be used to evoke the entity, when healing someone else. The latter approach of evocation focused on the concept that although the symbol was a personal one for your body, it could still be used to find a resonance with the specific neurotransmitter or other entities in a body. The entities could then be worked with to aid in healing or doing whatever else a person might wish to do.

My latest work with these concepts has continued to focus on creating better communication with the human body. Most of the communication that the average person seems to have with the body is reactionary, based more on what the body tells the person and less on a conscious choice to communicate. The rest of the communication that seems to occur focuses on cultural attitudes of the body disseminated to it by memetics. At least in the U.S., we live in a fairly body phobic culture, which perceives the body as a dirty, sinful sack of flesh, with impulses and desires that need to be repressed as much as possible, in order to avoid making a scene. A person rips a fart and everyone glares at the offender, the smell of it offending that most delicate of sensibilities that a person should never smell anything unpleasant.

In fact, it is the relationship a person has with the five external senses that tells a lot about how connected a person is with hir body. For many people, the senses of smell and taste are discounted, only coming into play when its time to eat. We are taught to use deodorant to avoid offending someone with the smell of the body. And heaven’s forbid you should happen to actually smell anything associated with human waste. We are taught to crinkle our noses, and avoid such smells. Taste also becomes a victim of the focus on what you’re eating. Don’t ever stick your tongue out in a city. You’ll taste all the pollution that it’s in the air. With sight, touch, and sound, there are various forms of similar aversive reactions, all brought about by cultural engineering. A cultural aversion of what seems unpleasant has overtaken our instincts. We are taught to avert our eyes, not touch, nor listen, and yet this very repression of our senses leads to a rebellion for the body itself, which knows that it must get our attention somehow in order to be taken care of.

When a person complains about how s/he doesn’t like hir body, I tell hir to try listening to hir body more. Choosing not to acknowledge what our external senses tell us only invites the body to respond in more drastic ways. For instance, the smell a person’s body exudes can tell that person if s/he is sick, healthy, even give a sense of what s/he has eaten. But when we choose to deny the information our senses provide us, we ignore the fundamental reality of the body and the fact that without it we could not exist in a meaningful physical manner. Bear in mind as well, that if we’re used to ignoring the external senses, we’ve also probably suppressed the internal senses.

Internal senses deal with an awareness of the actual state of the body. Balance, as an example, is an internal sense. We normally don’t think of balance as a sense, and rarely acknowledge it until we actually lose balance. Another internal sense is the kinesthetic awareness we have of the movement of our bodies. We’re aware of this sense, but it’s probably fair to say that most people take it for granted, or aren’t sure what to make of it when they feel it. There are more internal senses that could be explored, but for now suffice to say that your body has many wonders and mysteries for you to explore.

When I originally decided to come up with a language to communicate with body, I limited myself, thinking I would create a language to facilitate better communication with the neurotransmitters and bacteria, and other such beings. But shortly into trying to develop such a language, my entity for dopamine told me I already had a language and way of communicating with him and the other entities, i.e. my AOD for the body. Realizing that, I knew I didn’t need a language for interacting with those entities and I puzzled over why I might even need a language at all, until that is my left knee began bothering me with some joint pain. I’d always had a kinesthetic feeling of pain in that knee and I’d never really come to terms with what caused the pain. I could lessen the pain if I popped the knee joint, but eventually it would come back. I knew, when I felt that pain that although I could communicate with my neurotransmitters I hadn’t necessarily communicated with my body as a whole.

I could’ve used breathing techniques and guided visualization to try and communicate with my knee. These approaches had worked with getting in touch with the neurotransmitters and even with some of the cell work I did, but I felt that although those techniques could play a role, they might not be the best way to get in touch with the consciousness of my body. And while focusing on the internal senses could be helpful in finding specific problems with the body, I also felt that alone wasn’t enough to address the body. I decided instead to look toward the biphotonic energy that’s within cells. This energy is used in the DNA of cells for communication and other functions. I also looked into a recent science article, which argued that nerves use sound instead of electricity for communication1. This is done because the membranes for nerves allow sound to be sustained instead of gradually weakening. I figured that using sound or biphotonic energy I could develop a way to communicate with the body that would allow me to actually have a conversation, albeit in a different medium than language itself.

What I ended up developing looks like a lot of lines and dots on paper. The lines are long signals, while the dots are short signals. In addition, some shapes such as triangles and curved lines were also developed to help with the context of communication. Also it’s important to note that the language isn’t a linear language with one word follow after the other. Instead it might be fair to say it’s more of a pictograph language. As of yet there aren’t many of these pictographs developed, but over time more maybe developed.

My first experiment was to communicate with my knee. I used breathwork to put myself into meditation. I then focused my kinesthetic awareness on the pain in my knee. Once my awareness was fully on that location, I began communicate, imagining a series of sounds going from my consciousness to my knee. It did help me to visualize the sounds as lines and dots, but that was mainly for me, a convenient interface for my human consciousness as it interacted with the cellular consciousness in my knee. I used the sounds and visualization to guide the biophotonic energy in its work with the knee.

When I communicated with my knee in this way, memories of a bike ride down a rocky path and falling and hitting my knee, as well as hurting my leg and belly came to the forefront of my consciousness. Instead of dismissing this memory, I realized that my knee was communicating in return showing the cause of the pain. Long after a memory fades from the conscious mind, it can still reside in the flesh. The body retains the memory and can relive it at any moment and my knee was reliving the cause of its pain, as well as showing me that the issue dealt with more than just the knee. In fact, my left leg has always troubled me a bit, and now I knew what the cause was.

I continued using the dots and lines to communicate with my cells, but also interacted with the memory. The dots and lines instructed the biophotonic energy of my cells to start repairing any damage that might be in my knee and leg. The memory interaction involved comforting the earlier version of myself, while taking a look at the leg and doing some healing to that memory. Over the course of a few days I continued my interaction with my knee, going back to the memory, but also continuing to use the language I’d developed to communicate with my cells. I healed the pain in the knee and in my leg, to the point that I didn’t need to pop it as often. The kinesthetic sense of my knee is that it now feels stronger. I feel as if I can walk with more confidence on my left leg.

I am still developing the language I use to communicate with my body. I’m doing it not only to have a better awareness of my body, but to also continue advancing the concepts I wrote about in Inner Alchemy. I am certain that just as I’m developing a language to communicate with my body, it’s possible for other people to develop their own language or use the one I create. The reason I mention developing your own language is because your body is your own. You must be willing to speak with it and listen to it, because it has its own forms of consciousness. By acknowledging that consciousness, you can work closely with your body and come to not only a better understanding of it, but also much more comfort with it. Since healing my knee and leg I’ve felt much more comfortable with my body. Another benefit as well is the potential to communicate with the body when ill, in order to coordinate its efforts to heal itself, but that is experimentation for a later time as the language is further developed.

The Survival is made possible by the Extra-bodies, i.e. dismembered, unravelled, decayed inorganic elements. The History of the Flesh is born from the flesh that pain and wounds have carved. Gratuitous pictures expose themselves to the Sadistic Look of the Dead, whose eyes capture all that was alive and throbbing until a few seconds ago! The Desiccated Blood gluts the Vampire’s appetite, exciting coagula let the Vampire reach the supreme extasy of idyllic Love. An orgy of Satiated Eyelids.

Alchemic Sublimation gives way to a compulsive passage from the mechanicisms of Po-Mo Anthropological Sadism to the actual practice of Necromimesis. The dimension of the Extra-body shows up at the banquet of the Womb’s fauces, an ancient deposit of Magmatic Desire of Pleasure turns into an appearance of death.

Thou shalt take thy surgical instruments, thy bistoury, thy forceps and needles. You will lie confortable on your bed and suddenly begin to map your body following innate schemes, precise lines of carving. You will cut and dig, snatch all your useless rotting organs out of your body and put them on the table beside the bed, and dance with them. Here we dance, Knowledge and Concupiscence dance a wonderful Eleusinian tango.

The image passes through consciousness and realizes itself in the impalpability of the Extra-body Protector, the basic mechanic principle of Human aggressiveness, the only antidote to the paranoidogenic separation between life and death.

I have floated through the “buildings” around us, riding a huge Invertebrate, digging tunnels in the Desert of Human Experiences. Down there, in a red room, viscous walls covered with big plasmodia, I found an embryo. It had been turned inside out, all its organs exposed to the Look which re-assembled the parts into the Dimension of the Extra-body.

Disappearance of the Game/Body, appearance of the Extra-body. The Presumed Actual Reality is based upon the vanishing of delusions, the Reality/Truth is the Assassination of the game, the hiding of its corpse.

To a Ghost-Body dispossessed of life I add a heap of flesh, spoiled organs and rotting remainders. An unlikely oneirocriticism of wordless guts, a cathartic cynicism and, maybe, the Supreme Reason.

Extra-body: it makes me think (?). Its weight is unbearable, its merciless categories of judgement are inadmissible now that the Party is beginning – I really can’t believe my own eyes when I see that the majority of people are even able to fuck with their Extra-body!